Reforming the Scottish Parish

The Reformation in Fife, 1560-1640

John McCallum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754669104
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317069454
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Protestant Reformation of 1560 is widely acknowledged as being a watershed moment in Scottish history. However, whilst the antecedents of the reform movement have been widely explored, the actual process of establishing a reformed church in the parishes in the decades following 1560 has been largely ignored. This book helps remedy the situation by examining the foundation of the reformed church and the impact of Protestant discipline in the parishes of Fife. In early modern Scotland, Fife was both a distinct and important region, containing a preponderance of coastal burghs as well as St Andrews, the ecclesiastical capital of medieval Scotland. It also contained many rural and inland parishes, making it an ideal case study for analysing the course of religious reform in diverse communities. Nevertheless, the focus is on the Reformation, rather than on the county, and the book consistently places Fife's experience in the wider Scottish, British and European context. Based on a wide range of under-utilised sources, especially kirk session minutes, the study's focus is on the grass-roots religious life of the parish, rather than the more familiar themes of church politics and theology. It evaluates the success of the reformers in affecting both institutional and ideological change, and provides a detailed account of the workings of the reformed church, and its impact on ordinary people. In so doing it addresses important questions regarding the timescale and geographical patterns of reform, and how such dramatic religious change succeeded and endured without violence, or indeed, widespread opposition.

CHAPTER 1
The Reformation of the Ministry

One of the first, and most important, tasks facing the newly reformed church in 1560 was establishing a preaching ministry in the parishes. The three marks of the true church were considered to be the preaching of the Word, the sacraments rightly administered and discipline.1 All three of these marks were dependent on the presence in each parish of a minister, and so the progress made in planting such a ministry is a crucial issue for any examination of the success of the early church. This question has not been entirely neglected by historians, but research so far has focused on two particular aspects of the early ministry: its financial basis and patterns of conformity among the pre-Reformation clergy. Thus the actual provision of ministers to parishes has not been at the forefront of most analyses. There has also been a distinct bias towards the early period from 1560 until 1574, the terminal date of Charles Haws’s biographical survey of Scottish ministers.2 Coupled with the knowledge that a preaching ministry was well established in most areas by the early seventeenth century, this has left something of a gap in our understanding of the establishment of the reformed ministry in Scotland. We know that eventually a complete ministry was successfully established in areas like Fife, but our knowledge of the process itself is altogether patchier.

In an attempt to redress this imbalance, and provide a firm basis for the rest of the book, this chapter traces the provision of ministers to Fife parishes, beginning in 1560 with the official establishment of the reformed church, and continuing through to about 1600, the date by which a full parish ministry was more or less in place. The focus is ‘bottom-up’ insofar as the key theme is the success and speed with which the parishes of Fife were provided with an adequate ministry, not the financial underpinnings or pre-Reformation background of that ministry, although such matters obviously affected the provision of ministers. The Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae is the standard source of information on ministers, but while it contains a wealth of vital information, it is not sufficiently comprehensive in its listing of ministers, especially in the early years after 1560.3 Charles Haws’s work on the pre-1574 ministry is more complete, but in order to trace the establishment of the ministry beyond that point it became necessary to produce a fresh list of Fife ministers, based on a variety of sources, to provide the basic data for this chapter.4 This list, although it is necessarily based on incomplete sources and so still imperfect, contains ministers missing from other lists and has corrected many dates, providing a much firmer base for analysis.5 The list also forms the starting point for the database used for analysis of the ministry as a profession in Chapter 5.

As a result of this investigation, a clearer picture has emerged of the process by which a comprehensive ministry was established in Fife. Although some parishes were provided with ministers very early on, and in some cases earlier than hitherto realised, the path to a complete ministry in Fife was a gradual and complicated one. Many of these early ministers had to serve between two and four parishes, a situation that began well before Regent Morton’s scheme for grouping parishes together, and continued until the 1590s.6 This meant that for most of Fife parish provision was sketchy and based on the sharing of ministers for at least the first three decades after the Reformation, raising a number of questions about the reformed church. Many parishes relied on the services of a reader, who could read prayers and passages from scripture but could not expound the Word from the pulpit.7 This may force us to reconsider our appraisal of the primacy of preaching in the Scottish kirk, at least in the early years.8 And we may have to re-evaluate how far it is possible to generalise about religious culture in areas which may have had inadequate provision of preaching, sacraments and discipline. On the reformers’ own definition, they were struggling to sustain a ‘true’ church.

Historiography and Methodology

The modern historiography of the post-Reformation Scottish clergy begins with the work of Gordon Donaldson, which uncovered many of the relevant sources and established key trends. In two important articles he outlined the sources for study of the early ministry and called for local studies using these sources to examine the financial provision for ministers, and the pre-Reformation antecedents of these ministers.9 Such local studies did follow, many written by Donaldson himself and Charles Haws, and focused on the proportion of clergy who conformed and served in the new church.10 This approach enabled Donaldson to address the question of the conversion of pre-Reformation clerics, an important issue for the traditional historiography of the Reformation with its focus on counting converts. But the focus was very much on the first few years of the reformed church, and although some attempt was made to list the numbers of serving ministers and readers in each area, there was little attempt to relate the total numbers to actual parish service. The work of Charles Haws was similarly focused on the conformity of pre-Reformation clerics: half of his biographical study of the parish clergy was devoted to a list of post-1560 clergy with their pre-Reformation antecedents. For the purposes of the questions asked here, he only went so far as to say that the Dioceses of St Andrews and Glasgow had ‘some kind of service in many churches by 1567’.11 Similarly, Donaldson’s work on the financial provision for the ministry illustrated some of the problems facing the church in the 1560s, but did not really relate these difficulties to the grass-roots problems of providing ministers to parishes.12 Providing ministers to parishes required not merely a set of stipends, but also a supply of adequate and willing men, so tracing the establishment of the ministry involves more than tracing the fluctuations in the church’s financial resources.13

Since these initial path-finding studies, there has not been a serious attempt to address this problem on the national or local scale. This is not to say that there has been no discussion of the state of the parish ministry. The main dividing line has been between James Kirk’s positive assessment of the early establishment of the ministry, and Michael Lynch’s more negative view.14 Kirk pointed out that some parishes did have ministers in the early 1560s (like Aberdour and Collessie in Fife) and argued for a quick and successful establishment of the ministry.15 Lynch responded that while there were some notable early successes, these were hampered by the deaths of the pre-Reformation clerics and that the situation as late as the 1590s was far from perfect.16 There is some truth in both these positions, but the question is not one which can be answered by a simple date at which ministers were in place. This quick-slow continuum is not necessarily the most helpful way to try to appraise the success of the church in providing ministers. This is partly because it is not based on a detailed analysis of parish provision, but also because the complexities of the evidence do not lend themselves to simplistic conclusions. Like other recent historians to address this question, Lynch refers to national statistics such as the 400 benefices which were still unfilled in the early 1590s.17 Historians often compare the number of parishes in Scotland or a particular region with the number of ministers, quite understandably since no detailed study exists from which to work. But this misses the problem of parishes which shared ministers, and often includes readers in the total number of clerics.18 Kirk picks out a few parishes which had some early provision, but without a sustained local analysis of provision, parish by parish, it is impossible to be certain how typical these parishes were, or how accurate are either his, or Lynch’s conclusions.

For the local analysis in this chapter a list was compiled of ministers, readers and exhorters in Fife from 1560 to 1600.19 The starting-point for the compilation of this list was the two published lists of ministers, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae and Haws’s Scottish Parish Clergy. The Fastiis missing some clerics entirely, and does not always have the complete dates of some clerics. Although the latter is more reliable, some alterations have been made where primary sources diverged from Haws’s material. These lists have been supplemented by various published sources which have supplied additional information. Some of these provide as much detail as a list of ministers in an individual year, but most simply yield occasional references to named ministers and confirm suspected ministers from other sources.20 The main body of additional material, however, consisted of unpublished Exchequer records, of which the most important class was the records of the ‘Assignation and Modification of Stipends’.21 These provided a great deal of additional information for the more difficult period after 1574, added clerics for which we previously had no record, and significantly revised the dates of some clerics. The ‘Assignation’ records are also fortunately arranged by minister rather than by parish, making strikingly obvious the fact that so many parishes had to share ministers. The Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae often states that a minister from a neighbouring parish had ‘oversight’ of a particular charge, but in practice such ministers seem to have been considered fully minister of both charges.22 This has perhaps been concealed by the fact that when ministers are named, for example in General Assembly records, they are usually only mentioned as minister of one parish, even if they in fact had several in their charge. James Kirk rightly points out that some of the evidence for ministers is incomplete, and that any list of ministers must always be a minimum since there may have been ministers who went unrecorded.23 While the list remains a minimum estimate, the likelihood of a significant quantity of unrecord...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Charts
• List of Tables
• Abbreviations
• Conventions
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Fife
• Introduction
• 1 The Reformation of the Ministry
• 2 The Reformation of Discipline
• 3 The Reformation of Worship
• 4 Sermon, Song and Text: Religious Instruction in Fife and Beyond
• 5 The Ministry as a Profession
• 6 The Kirk Session in Context
• 7 ‘Ecclesiastical Discipline uprightlie ministred’: Discipline in Action
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index